A Haiku and A Limerick.

Oh evil thesis
how you torture and demean
I will overcome


My thesis is quite diabolical
Achilles was very paradoxial
The man was a douche
He should have ferme-d his bouche
And I'm stuck writing crap hyperbolical.

On a happier note...

Our department secretary often emails us with job opportunities, research opportunities, and conference calls. Most of the time I ignore these emails, as they generally have little or nothing to do with my area of interest. Last Monday, though, we received an email about a job that was right up my alley. One of the professors in our department got funding to hire 1 graduate student and 4 undergraduates to compare usage in the Corpus of Contemporary American English to usage as prescribed in the Chicago Manual of Style. This job includes co-authoring a paper with the professor and presenting at an international conference on corpus linguistics, which is kinda my thing. I have been working with a different professor for almost two years on the development of the Corpus of Historical American English, helped him compile the forthcoming Frequency Dictionary of American English, based on data from the COCA, and also helped him organize and run the American Association of Corpus Linguistics Conference back in 2007. This project is a perfect segue between the work I've been doing and the work I want to do in my grown-up life. I've applied to a program in Forensic Linguistics, which is using language as evidence, etc., and this project would be a perfect bridge between compiling the data (which is what I've been doing) and transforming that data into meaningful conclusions about language usage.
I am SO FREAKING HAPPY!!!

Victim Blaming in Provo.

I got into a bit of an altercation on my way to school today. I was driving down the road, and was cut off my a douche in an Acura. I tooted my horn at him because I'm from the east and we do that there, and because I seriously almost hit him and I have no airbags in my very old car. To this, the driver of the Acura slowed down to a near stop in the road. Seriously. He was crawling. Just to piss me off. When it was safe, I went around him, flipped him a quick bird, and continued on my way. He sped up and started tailgating me...and FOLLOWING ME!! Rather than parking in the lot like I had planned, I left the lot and started taking multiple turns, trying to get rid of said douche. He kept following me. After a few minutes of erratic driving, I was stopped at a traffic light. He pulled up beside me and started verbally harassing me. I told him that I was calling the cops, and then he sped off.
I did call the cops. His assessment? I escalated the situation. I was being an aggressive driver and I brought it on myself. Seriously. So, warning, ladies: it's apparently acceptable for men to chase you down with their cars and verbally assault you. Just like when you wear a low-cut shirt, you're asking to be raped. Geniuses.

Bra Color Postings.

So, as we've all heard and read by now, there was a thing going around on FB for women to post their bra colors for Breast Cancer awareness. Many people are up in arms over this. To these people I will say this: get off your damn high horse. So no money is being raised. So what?
I haven't lost a family member to breast cancer and so I don't think about it every day. So yeah, maybe taking 5 effing seconds to think about my bra color will get me thinking about my own breast health. What the hell is wrong with that? I have boobs. I have pretty bras. If I don't take care of my boobs, if I don't get regular examinations, I could lose one or both of them. I won't have my boobs anymore, and won't be wearing my pretty bras. Yeah. thinking about my bra color got me thinking about my boobs, which I think was kinda the point. It reminded me that I'm overdue for an exam.
The email I got didn't say anything about tricking boys or anything retarded like that. That was stupid, granted. But you know what? I was happy to see that my friends and family members were taking 5 seconds to think about breast health. So it's not going to change the world. That wasn't really the point. We can't all change the world and we don't all have the resources to make grand statements and gestures. We can all take a few minutes to think about our own health.
Get off your soapbox. Nobody got hurt. Get over it.